The great box office debate

Off late the hot topic on moviewood across India is, why are the megastars of Bollywood flopping big time, whereas relatively small scale superstars from Tollywood and down under are raking in the moolah. Possibly “Pan Indian” would be the word of the year on movie world, which in turn could arguably be one of the most confusing term as well. What is pan Indian? One which is acceptable to people all over India is the direct meaning right? If a telugu or tamil movie dubbed or made in hindi as bi-lingual, how come hindi movies are never termed so? Is it accepted by default that hindi is defacto pan india language? If that is the case, I fail to understand why all the noise over common language for India by the very same group, who have no problem in accepting their creations being labeled as Pan India, only after they are made in hindi!! “Hindi theriyathu poda” “hindi pesatha tamizhan” nu tee shirt poatukitu pose kudupom aana hindi la release panra padatha thaan pan India padam nu sonna summa irupom!!! Seeing this, hypocrisy died a thousand deaths is the unreported news item. While success has many takers and followers, failures often need some scapegoat or pretext. After riding over a crest of churning one crappy movie after other which made zillions of money at the BO, corona has given people some breathing space and truck load of options on genres from across the world. While the failed stars blame the pan Indian approach of the successful “invaders” from down south, they fail to see the reality, which is actually residing inside their pockets. Every mobile phone carrying an OTT app is direct competition for their “throne”. As people get more options, their demand or taste changes and having been restricted within home has surely given the public not just the comfort of watching a movie, any movie across any global language as long as there are subtitles, without spending several thousands for an evening of movie watch in any theater, skipping over the portions they get bored or even pausing the movie for a casual watch later, it is not just the home comfort but having been spoilt for choices, to recapture the attention of general public, serving the same stale dish is not going to workout for the geriatric stars of yesteryears. Uniformly, without bias, every single major actor’s movie have flopped big time and the tale it tells is very simple and straight forward – adapt. As against the hyped up reason of south movies, eating up Bollywood ruling space, even the mega star’s down below are not insulated against this growing trend, despite enjoying more fanatical following as compared to their western counterparts. By choice or by design, story-telling is back in focus and it augurs well for movies and creators, who can now spend more on cooking up more creative stories rather than on call sheets of mega stars.